Martha Tilston
Martha Tilston will release her new album Machines of Love and Grace on October 22. The new album will be accompanied by the single ‘Stags Bellow’, (October 22) and a headline UK tour, including London’s Bush Hall on Thursday, November 8.
The daughter of folk legend Steve Tilston, Martha Tilston found herself drawn to folk’s protest spirit and its themes of social justice from an early age.
She crafted her own anti-war anthem, ‘Saddest Game’, in 2004, for Big Issue's Peace Not War compilation, an early foreshadowing of the eloquent, politicized questioning that suffuses her latest LP, Machines Of Love and Grace, a collection of subtly charged acoustic folk songs tinged with electric guitar and touches of electronica.
The title is a nod to a beat poem by Richard Brautigan and the BBC2 documentary that lifted the poem’s title: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
"The programme blew me away. It tackled a lot of the questions my peers are asking: how the finances are run, how we’ve let machines take over and how those machines run us".
Like Mitchell’s Woodstock, which painted an image of exploding bombs transforming into butterflies, Tilston’s Machines ponders the conflict between human life and the machinery of modern age.
Tilston underpins her pastoral narratives with meaningful contexts, such as lead single ‘Stags Bellow’, a stirring paean to freedom and the wild deer that roam the Royal Parks.
Tilston’s songwriting eschews the hoary ‘moors and maids’ folk imagery of old for gentle, probing meditations on modern concerns such as consumerism ('More'), urbanization ('Suburbia'), unheard voices ('Silent Women') and with 'Wall Street', the disastrous ebb and flow of stock market tides, a paced, determined number Tilston wrote inspired by the then-emerging Occupy movement.
Says Tilston, "A few years ago, folk went very mainstream. It was good in a lot of ways, because it meant loads of people were taking up instruments and learning the old songs. But the world was in crisis and it felt weird that folk, which has always been the people’s music, was totally avoiding that and not acknowledging it".
UK Live Dates:
Saturday, October 27 Penzance The Acorn
Tuesday, November 6 Glastonbury Assembly Rooms
Thursday, November 8 London Bush Hall*
Saturday, November 10 Heden Bridge Folk & Roots Festival
Tuesday, November 13 Brighton Komedia
Thursday, November 15 Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre